Public Quest Rewards: DPS vs. Support Roles?
The rewards from public quests have been a hot topic on the community forums lately, with a few players wondering if just healing or playing a support role results in a lesser chest than all out DPS. As the rumor that only good dps’ers would get the best loot swept the community, some support classes have resorted to dealing out pure dps and not healing, which doesn’t make for a very successful raid.
We may yet hear from the Devs on this issue, but until then, the only information available is from the core design of public quests. Our understanding of the dynamics of public quests is that rewards are awarded to stop players from hitting the bad guys a couple of times and then going AFK, and to reward those people who participate fully. Instead of the normal loot drop system, public quests use “participation scoring” to determine what reward each player gets at the end of the encounter. The game keeps track of everything a player does during the encounter, which includes contributing to a kill, spells cast, and noncombat interactions. The players with the most activity get the best loot. It’s not competitive, either, so if everyone contributed equally, everyone gets a good individual reward.
So why did you get a lesser reward, and your friend a better one? Either you could have done more, or lag could have interfered with your effectiveness, causing the system to record a lower effort, through no fault of your own. The chest drops are also random to some extent. It certainly could appear at times that someone from a support class was getting a lesser reward than a damage dealer, but in theory the game itself doesn’t differentiate between hitting things with a sword and casting heals. It just isn’t designed to give less weight to support classes than direct damage classes. So don’t be afraid to join a public quest and do what your class does best, even if that is healing or buffing and not dealing a fatal blow. You will still have an equal chance at the best chests, as long as you participated fully in the encounter.
Also, there are reports that each of the Public Quests offer slightly different loot, with the Ring War and Storm Gorge offering upgrades for different slots. So if you are just doing the Ring War to avoid the lag of Storm Gorge, you may want to reconsider.
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Comments (10)
Grimmond
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I would be very interested in finding out the answer to that as my Warden has yet to recieve a chest from a public quest. I have done and completed three Storm Gorges and two Ring War PQs.
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Jathan@Permafrost
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I’ve been doing these off and on with my Inquisitor for a few days now. Gotten 4 pieces, I think, of the upper end gear (not at home to verify, but I believe that’s right).
All of those came from Exquisite level boxes.
What I have been doing…
Ring War: Heal, Cure, DPS in that order. When the recruits pop, I help go after them instead of wait around in the middle.
Storm Gorge: Wow. Lag Fest 2011. I hit the group heal, wait about 10 seconds for it to cast. Myth Group Cure/Heal, wait 10 seconds. Repeat. That’s about all I’m able to do, minus an occasional Penance/MD (single and group reactive heal).
The chest and weapon, both fabled if I understand things correctly, are in the rare chest for the level 5 difficulty encounter. AKA – Have 24+ people present, and the difficulty cannot lower at all. Hard as it gets.
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Ladyatremis
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“It certainly could appear at times that someone from a support class was getting a lesser reward than a damage dealer, but in theory the game itself doesn’t differentiate between hitting things with a sword and casting heals. It just isn’t designed to give less weight to support classes than direct damage classes.”
Its allot easier to rack up the ‘damage points’ than “healing points” Someone has to be damaged in order to be healed. That includes ward healers claiming heal points. Attacking you just stab till its dead without any limitations period ….
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zerigo
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Last night we had 40+ people, and not only did i tank all the mobs, but i also topped the dps parse, parsing over 40k. Still got a crap box, seems completly random, and im sure it has little regard for dps. I have yet to get a piece of armor, even though i have guildies that have 4-5 already. This X4 ring war only took 5 mins, which is already a major improvement.
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Sadres
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I can certainly agree with the above poster. Despite doing far and away the most damage in many cases (except when Syndarin comes and ruins that for me), I’ve gotten jack diddly-squat when it comes to rewards. I’ve been at 50k+ on the damage parse and seen a fellow Ranger down at 11k get the Fabled loot. It seems arbitrary and random, and that’s irritating.
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Zubglub
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A guild mate of mine plays a templar @ level 87 or 88 when this happened… he showed up.. the raid was full and could not get an invite to an outside raid group. PQ in SG kicked off, so he just did MINIMAL damage as a templar can’t really DPS much, loot.. FABLED WEAPON. Same goes for another of my guildies playing a monk who is a very low parser. DPS amount does NOT mean jack squat.
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Kalone
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From what I’ve seen so far, the basic rewards are completely random, based only on the difficulty of the quest completed. I have tanked every mob in the encounter, doing pretty high dps, and gotten basic rewards, and I have come in at the last 15 seconds of a PQ, hit the mob once, and gotten an exquisite. However, the fabled rewards for completing the x4 (weapon, chestpiece, rune) do seem to be somewhat based on participation. The best I can see is that they are given either to the highest dps parse, the highest heal parse, or the highest threat parse.
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Bessanna
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I heal/ward and debuff if not lagging and have recieved the exquisite chest lots of times (no chest yet but oh well…) so its clearly just rumor.
Rabbie, Butcherblock, The Black Knights
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Prrasha
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I’ve gotten three of the “good” rewards, total…
– my paladin got an adornment (when two-boxing with my bard, just the two of us in the group)
– my illusionist got the robe (in a five-man guild group, but not in the x4 raid party… Her everquest2.exe crashed right at the start of the x4… but she didn’t get kicked off the server until the x4 was dead… she logged back in to the “loot the chest” step of the quest, and got the robe despite doing nothing for the final encounter but radiating her always-on buffs from her linkdead self… a guildie ranger also got the chest armor on that run.)
– and my autofollower bard got the weapon (again, just two-boxed with the paladin and not in raid)
All three of these rare drops came from the Ring War, though I have gotten the next-best rewards (pants, etc.) from Storm Gorge (and I have seen other people get the top rewards there.)
I’ve never gotten the “good” drops when I’ve been part of the main raid force, in any role, nor have I ever gotten a drop on a healer.
There is no way any of the three of us that got the top rewards were the top threat or DPS in their events, since, when I’m not in raid, I start up on the hill and kill recruits and the minor encounters on my way down to the main raid, usually arriving at the x2 when it’s about 10-15 seconds from death. And I’ve seen the raiders who only attack the 2 raid encouters get the rewards, so there doesn’t seem to be a bonus for touching all the different encounters in ringwar.
TL;DR: I think it’s very rare and very random.
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Striinger
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I’m not 100% sure how it works, but having done dozens, it appears that there is a threshold relative to the overall encounter. The threshold puts you either in or out for loot. The encounter difficulty sets the drop tier and pure luck drives which cache you get.
My wife is a healing fury and I play a ranger. Over the same period she got 5, exquisites and I got one. I did at least 10% of raid damage every time and was always in the top 3 overall for damage dealt.
There is either a LOT of RNG involved or damage is weighted pretty low.
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